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Life on a shoestring: Part III — Food

No, this is not a post about eating peanut butter and bread or becoming a vegan or freegan to save money. This was supposed to be a longer piece, but… well…

Canada, as a whole, is awash in food. Not only are we facing an obesity epidemic, but we have the luxury of eating more food just so that we can or ought to go burn it off at the gym. Yes, many of us are quite sedentary, but for those of us that aren’t, if you had to limit your daily physical energy expenditure to 500 “leisure” calories, what would you use them for? Taking a walk? Playing an instrument?

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Trick or Treat, Mayor Ford!

I wish a large number of people would dress up as Marg Delahunty ((Would that make her Marg Delahaunty?)), Princess Warrior, and go trick or treating at the Mayor’s house. Those not wanting to go the whole nine yards could grab a video camera and film the ordeal or drive a black SUV carrying the faux camera crews and Princess Warriors.

I love pranks.

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Life on a shoestring: Part II — Pedal for your Power

We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles. — Thomas Edison

I recall going to a science centre as a child and seeing a stationary bike hooked up to a generator and lightbulb. Museum patrons could do a bit of cycling and watch as the light burned brightly. Nowadays, cycling powers exercise bikes’ onboard computers and “regular” bikes can be hooked up to generators at the cost of a few hundred dollars. Now, before I continue, I must stress that the thought experiment proposed should remain as such — a thought experiment — and no more. It would likely fail on both an economic and environmental basis in the context discussed.

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Life on a shoestring: Part I — "Friends"

Dunbar’s number is the name given to a theoretical limit on the number of people one can maintain long-term stable relationships. This number has previously been pegged at values around one or two hundred. In this era of social networking, given that the number of on-line “friends” we have can run into several hundred if not thousands, it’s easy to believe that technology, through external cognition, has helped us overcome cognitive limits imposed by the zombie food sloshing around our skulls. Except it probably hasn’t.

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Brain on autopilot or in "the zone"?

The notion of “flow”, also known colloquially as being “in the zone”, is a state where one just breezes through the task at hand and one is fully focused on the task as subjective time distorts. Part of  sports psychology deals with training athletes to get into the zone. One thing that athletes are told to do is ignore the manual details of the sport and focus on their goals. For example, professional golfers perform better when they focus on putting that little white ball in the cup and ignore their swing.

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Mystery at VL/HCC

First off…  Nicky, how about photographing some GI Joes for your assignment? They don’t move much! Now back to our regularly scheduled blog.

Last week, at VL/HCC, there was someone that claimed to be a student that stayed in the Statesman’s Room at the Sheraton where the conference was being held. When asked by some fellow conference goers about grabbing a bite, she’d claim to be tired or in need of presentation practice. Since I figured out within a few minutes of meeting her that she wasn’t alone in Pittsburgh from her mannerisms and a few verbal clues without me having to so much as utter a word in conversation, I found it hilarious that others were surprised to learn that she had actually been spending her time with a “secret” companion. This was despite the numerous conversations others had had with her. And then there was the case of the false identities…

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When life is a beach ball

Do you have a Mac that beach balls (colourful pinwheels that produce colourful language) for 30-60 seconds at a time when you’re not running a computationally intensive task? Your hard drive could be dying. I hope you’re backing up. But I’m not writing this blog post to convince you that backing up your data regularly is a good idea (but it is, though). Instead, I’m going to show you how to see if that is indeed what is causing the beach balling and, if so, how to keep on tempting fate by keeping your failing hard drive chugging along while reducing your unwanted trips to the beach ((Is it any wonder why computer scientists tend to be so pasty?))

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Academic nightmare

Back when I was in high school, I had the occasional dream where I’d forgotten to hand in some homework or some deadline was looming. I thought to myself, my high school is fairly high pressure. Maybe the dreams will stop when I start undergrad. In undergrad, I continued to have these dreams every once in a while. I thought to myself, “Self, these’ll probably stop once you’re done undergrad.” I had a few more of these dreams while taking classes in grad school. Whatever — surely they’ll stop when I’m done classes.
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